Open Data at Oxford University Computing Services

The vacancies dataset contains job listings from the University’s central recruitment site.

Updates and timeliness

We currently check for new vacancies every fifteen minutes.

Modelling and data

The data are represented in RDF, primarily using the vacancies vocabulary. Data are stored across two RDF graphs, one for current vacancies, and another for those that have closed.

We also take a copy of the associated documents, which are stored on source.data.ox.ac.uk. Where possible we pull out the plain text of each document and include it in the RDF. At some point we aim to implement full-text search, which should make it possible to search for phrases within job descriptions.

Querying the data

In addition to using SPARQL, you can retrieve vacancy data using the following methods:

Feeds

It’s possible to get the data as RSS and Atom using URLs of the following formats:

http://data.ox.ac.uk/feeds/vacancies/xxxxxxxx[.format]

This will return all vacancies within the unit with the OxPoints ID of xxxxxxxx. It will exclude any attached to its sub-units, so if you ask for the Social Sciences Division, you won’t get back anything in Classics. You can find the base URL by finding the unit you want on this page. Once you’ve found the base URL you can append the name of a format. We currently support various RDF serializations, RSS and RSS2.0, and Atom.

http://data.ox.ac.uk/feeds/all-vacancies/xxxxxxxx.format

This is the same as above, but includes vacancies advertised as being within the sub-units of the requested unit. So in this case you’d also get vacancies in Classics when you ask for the Social Sciences Division. This means that you can get a list of all vacancies within the University hierarchy from http://data.ox.ac.uk/feeds/all-vacancies/00000000.

In both of these cases you can filter by adding a ?keyword=keyword parameter to filter by a sub-string.

For the RSS and Atom feeds we’ve given the closing date as the publication date, which should help when re-displaying these feeds as part of another website.

Bugs and limitations

At the moment we only pull data from the University’s recruitment site, which excludes collegiate appointments. We’re working to re-integrate work that was done to pull additional vacancies from www.jobs.ac.uk.

Salary information is currently just plain text. In due course we plan to model the University’s salary scales, which we can then link to. Once that is done it’ll be possible to perform range-based SPARQL queries on grade and upper and lower annual remunerations.

Our location parsing isn’t perfect, so we sometimes assign vacancies to the wrong unit. We hope to make this a bit cleverer soon!